


Green Families

by 13thSyndicate



Category: Akatsuki no Yona | Yona of the Dawn
Genre: AU, Found Family, Gen, Gigan is best grandma, Jae-ha backstory spoilers, Jae-ha is best dad, Jae-ha meets the HHB, Jae-ha takes care of a smol girl child, Jae-ha with a successor, dad Jae-ha, dragon OC - Freeform, tw: child abuse mention, vignette fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 17:01:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8293318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13thSyndicate/pseuds/13thSyndicate
Summary: If a dragon kills their predecessor, the gods punish them with a successor. When Jae-ha finds this out the hard way, he realizes he can't let another Ryokuryuu child grow up in chains...





	

_“You’re an idiot, kid. The gods always punish the ones of us who get too big for our britches.”_

_Garou’s dying words rang through Jae-ha’s young ears, piercing into his brain, etching that moment into his consciousness._

_His unchained leg dripping blood that matched the wound in his predecessor’s face. He’d lashed out with all his strength, but… His strength was too strong. Garou laughing. The  words on his lips cut with a harsh and horrid grin._

_“You know the punishment, right? Kill a dragon and become what you killed.”_

_His breath slowed, then stopped. Jae-ha hadn’t understood, then, what he meant. Of course he became what he’d killed; there was only one dragon now. Only one._

_He hadn’t understood._

_The young mother screamed in anguish. He felt a small pit of dread growing in his stomach as a small form was thrust into his tiny arms. The mother sobbed but the village rejoiced. Maybe this new Ryokuryuu would be calmer than the troublemaker Jae-ha._

_He understood, now._

\-----

He was fourteen. He didn’t know how to take care of a child. Certainly, Garou hadn’t exactly been an exemplary ‘father’.  Still, at this age, at least there wasn’t much ‘taking care’ to be done. Feed her the milk given to him by the other villagers. Clean her when she needed cleaning. Keep her warm when she needed sleep. It was a difficult, annoying thing to get used to, but he managed. He had to.

Even at this tiny young age, the village wanted the baby chained. His old chains were too big, of course – as soon as he saw the fine, slender, child-sized manacles, he understood that he couldn’t stay. His leg was strong, now; no chain could hold it. That wouldn’t be true for much longer, of course, but for now… for now, he was strong enough to rescue the young girl.

 _Girl._ Of course it was a girl. Garou had been male, so was he, but it had been stupid to assume that all the dragons were. He looked at her, and he couldn’t hate her. He thought he could. Even now, he could feel the tie between them, tenuous, for now, but which he knew would get stronger and stronger until it consumed him. He should be able to. He should hate her. Garou hated him, after all; why shouldn’t he hate this small dragon girl?

He couldn’t hate her.

It didn’t even take his dragon leg to smash the chains holding her, they were so tiny. The archers shot at him, but it was the dead of night. It was almost pathetically easy to escape.

\-----

He was _fourteen._ He didn’t know how to take care of a child!

A fourteen-year-old boy with a dragon leg and a tiny girl-child and nowhere to go but _anywhere but here_. How had he expected to survive?! He was insane. He should go back. Chains and at least one meal a day were better than starving to death and free. Right?

Not right. The blood pounded in his dragon leg, itching for the sky. Not that he was going anywhere at the moment – fat drops of rain poured from the sky, and there wouldn’t be any food for miles around. What’s worse, the little girl wasn’t anywhere near old enough to be weaned. He’d been stealing goat milk from farms as they passed but he needed a place to barter for a steadier supply. He couldn’t let her die.

He couldn’t let her die. He didn’t know if it was just because she was small and helpless and looking at her made him angry for the him from the past, or if it was some instinct of the dragon’s blood, but he _couldn’t let her die._ He held her as close as he could without smothering her, and waited for the rain to stop.

\-----

“Hey! Captain, look what we caught!”

He’d really done it this time. He struggled, trying to break out of the hold of the two men who had him by the shoulders, but after he’d broken their companion’s ribs, they’d learned to keep well out of kicking distance, and stolen food that mostly went to the girl wasn’t exactly putting muscle anywhere else on his body. He’d always wondered if that was one of the reasons the village kept him starving, but… Well. No time to dwell on that now.

“Oh?”

The voice  - was that a _girl’s_ voice? No, not a girl. An old lady’s voice. The person it belonged to stepped out onto the deck of the ship, one eyebrow raised, a pipe clutched elegantly in her long, bony fingers. Jae-ha struggled more.

“Lemme go! Let me _go_ , tell these assholes to let me _go!_ ”

The old woman smirked, taking a puff at her pipe and then crossing her arms as she let out a plume of smoke.

“We found him trying to pick Tae-min’s pocket!” one of the burly men growled.

“Is that right?” asked the old woman, and Jae-ha just gave her a glare. “Why didn’t you just let him go? There are plenty of pickpockets in the city.”

“W-well…” one of them started.

“Y-y’see….”

“Spit it out.”

“….. the kid, he, he’s a monster!” one of them finally spat out, and Jae-ha glared at him with every vitriolic, angry bone in his body.

“A monster.” The captain – the old lady had to be the captain – sounded unimpressed. “Really.”

“A-Aye, Captain,” the other one said. “We saw him jump… it was like he was flying! And when he kicked Donbei, it sent him flying! Broke his ribs!”

“Is that true?” the Captain asked, looking at Jae-ha with discerning eyes, and he struggled.

“I don’t have to tell you!” he growled. “So what if I can fly or am a monster? What do you care?”

If he could make them angry, he could get them to let down their guard. The girl was still way too young to be on her own, and he couldn’t let them know about her. He had no clue what these pirates would do to a little girl – especially a girl with the dragon’s power. It had been careless to fight, he should’ve run. He should’ve gotten away. He should’ve-

“Well, if you really can jump as high as flying and take out a grown man twice your size with a single kick, we could use you, boy,” said the captain. “You wouldn’t have to be picking pockets or scrounging for food in back alleys anymore… or raiding Don Kum-ji’s guard posts, either, for that matter.”

His eyebrows shot up. One of the men holding onto his arms mumbled an unsteady ‘Captain?’ and she grinned.

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard the rumors, boy,” she told him. “A monster with grass for hair that can fly and shatter stone with a single kick taking out guard posts, raiding them for food and coin to spend at market? I expected you to be a little bit bigger, not a scrawny little thing that looks like a half-starved wild beast.”

Her eyebrow raised further. “I’ve heard some people talk about a green-haired beggar boy with a small child at his heel, too,” she said, and he flinched. “Thought so,” she said, and for a moment, those impossibly hard eyes seemed to soften. “If you fly for me,” she promised, “you and your brat will never want for anything. Do we have a deal?”

For the first time in almost as long as he could remember, Jae-ha felt the sensation of hope.

\------

Gigan was a surprisingly kind woman, when you got past the fact that she was as tough as old boot leather and the power of her awesome temper. Still, she never used force to discipline her men, no matter that she could have. People did what Gigan said, without question, without fail. She didn’t have to physically strike or threaten violence in order to get her way.

To Jae-ha, who’d grown up under Garou’s angry and even vengeful eye, it was nothing short of a miracle. The other crew members took to the girl, too, in ways he hadn’t expected to be possible. They were all rough seamen, but most had been fishermen before they were pirates. Many  of them had wives, sisters, daughters; many of them had lost those precious women to the threat of Don Kum-ji. Under their care, the girl, Midori, grew up strong and healthy. She learned to fish, to pick pockets, to fight (though Jae-ha bristled at the idea of her in a fight at first), both with weapons and with the natural power of the dragon. As she grew stronger, Jae-ha felt his leg beginning to weaken. There were times when his temper flared, when he felt tempted to turn it on her. He didn’t have an example of how to deal with those rages, but the first time he raised a hand to Midori, Gigan’s was there to stop him. She’d braised his hide up one end and down the other for daring raise a hand to a lady; when he’d cooled down, thought about what she said, he understood. He vowed to himself never to be to Midori what Garou had been to him.

Not that it wasn’t a challenge. Growing up among sailors, Midori had a foul mouth, and a temper and personality that seemed to be gleaned from her predecessor’s and from Captain Gigan’s. A fiery, impudent little brat that always seemed to be in the thick of things, she was a trial on his patience each and every day.

And yet.

Jae-ha was nineteen before he realized he loved the little girl. He was twenty-one before he allowed himself to express it. The sudden shock in the eyes of the then-seven-year-old hit him hard. No one had ever said that about him – he suddenly understood what it meant to her that he said it about her. From then on, he forced himself to say the words, over and over; when she did a good job at some task, when she felt insecure, when she felt scared, when she felt happy. Any time he thought that maybe he would have, in her place, wanted to hear it, he made himself say it. And it became easier, and easier. Just as easy as the platitudes that came off his lips as he flirted and teased the women of Awa, except this one compliment, this one phrase, came, heartfelt, straight from the core of him.

She kept him in line, too, just like Gigan, who she followed around the deck and learned the secrets of womanhood from. The crew was an odd family, but it was the one he had found for himself and for Midori.

\----

It was summertime when the strangers came to Awa. Summertime, when the coast was clear and traders came and Don Kum-ji sent out his horrible shipments and the pirates’ work was busy, when Gigan had Jae-ha fly out to the cliffside to gather Senjuso and Midori and the crew caught fish for meals and for salting to hold them through the winters. Jae-ha was prowling port for relaxation; he was the one who encountered and allied with a tall, dark-haired man attempting to defend a girl from Kum-ji’s so-called guards, but Midori was the one who first saw _her._

She kept her distance, of course. Jae-ha had beaten it into her (though not literally) that whatever she was curious about was usually bad for her (Gigan had helped with this lesson, as had her own experiences), so she was cautious and kept her distance from the potential threat offered by the redheaded girl and her outlandish bodyguards. She perched in a tree, watching with rapt attention, feeling something in her right leg pulling her forwards towards the party. She’d come out this way because she’d felt something, in the back of her mind – blue and white lights to join the brilliant green that was her Papa (and, for a single moment, a near-invisible flash of yellow that had followed her most of her life). Jae-ha had warned her, repeatedly, that such feelings meant danger, but she couldn’t simply _ignore_ them. She sat there in the trees until one of them, the blue-haired man who matched the blue light in her mind, turned to look at her.

\-----

When Shin-ah’s cursed-blessed eyes lighted on the source of green, it had winked out. Kija was going on about the green presence being hard to pinpoint, so he didn’t say anything. He had missed the green dragon; Kija also knew. Kija could tell them.

\------

The next few days were a game of cat-and-mouse. Jae-ha had forbidden Midori from getting close to the strangers; naturally, she followed them just out of sight. Of course, she had to keep an eye on her Papa, too – he was gallivanting about (in Gigan’s words) and flirting and drinking the day away like the no-good scoundrel he was. _Honestly._ She might be only eleven but she knew better than that! Captain Gigan wouldn’t let him get away with it if she caught him. _Captain_ made him act with proper respect.

She’d already had to drag him out of _one_ establishment by the ear today. The strangers were much more interesting.

She noticed that he was avoiding them, too; she could always keep track of his jumps and leaps and flights at the back of her mind. He was suiting actions to the words he’d preached at her, which was interesting because he _never_ did that. It was always ‘Midori, don’t!’ and then he would do exactly what he told her not to. So the strangers were double-interesting.

“….seem to be two of them,” said the man with the white hair. “I think. That’s the only thing I can think of that would explain it. Unless the green dragon’s power is to be in two places at once, which it shouldn’t be. His power is a strong leg, if the stories are correct!”

The blue one with the mask was looking around, and she ducked behind a chimney and practiced being still. She wasn’t really afraid of them anymore – though they knew about the green dragon! Was that why Papa was scared? – but Papa would be angry with her if she let herself get caught.

“One is close,” said the masked one quietly.

“Ah, Shin-ah is right!” said the white-haired one. “The other one seems much better at hiding from us…” Then, suddenly, his face turned into a frown she could just make out from the roof. “I wonder if it’s a predecessor and successor?” he asked, and his tone was sad. She frowned deeper, leaned out forward to catch his next words…

“Miiiidoorrriiiiiiii,” came an intense voice from behind her. She let out a startled ‘eep’ and turned to meet the annoyed face of her Papa. “I told you to stay away from them…!

She’d let him sneak up on her because she wasn’t paying attention! She gulped.

“B-but… but Papa, they… they know about the dragons…!” she complained. “I was doing recon! For Captain!”

“We don’t need them,” he said, intensely. “They’ve come after our power, and they’re going to try to take us away. So come back to the ship.”

“T-take us away?” she asked. “But… why? How? Couldn’t we just fly away if they come after us?”

He sighed. “Midori…. Some things, you just can’t understand until you’re older,” he told her, which she knew was his way of telling her he just didn’t want to say. “They have waysof making you want to go with them. They might chain you up if you disagree. The best way is to fly away now before they catch you. Do you understand?”

“No, I don’t!” she exclaimed, shooting upright… and lost her footing.

Jae-ha let out a startled yelp, reaching forwards to catch her, but their combined momentum and her body weight sent them tumbling to the ground. He twisted in the air, so that she would land on top of him, but….

“Ah!” exclaimed a female voice, and Midori’s eyes opened, tentatively, to find themselves staring into someone else’s. They were purple, she thought, dazed, as something seemed to build up inside her. She’d never seen anyone with purple eyes that wasn’t her or her papa, but these eyes were paler than Papa’s, clear and, and kind…

The something surged inside her and she had to bite back a scream….

**_ “WARRIORS OF THE FOUR DRAGONS.YOU ARE NOW OUR OTHER HALVES. HIRYUU IS YOUR MASTER; YOU WILL LOVE HIM, PROTECT HIM WITH YOUR LIFE, AND NEVER BETRAY HIM.” _ **

The voice was the last thing she heard before her body lost its hold on consciousness.

\--------

Jae-ha had hit one knee, but he still held Midori’s tiny frame close to his chest, trying to fight off the dragon blood enough to glare at the red-haired vision in front of him. The rational part of his mind was screaming to get away. Some other part of him was sighing in wonder at her beauty. The dragon’s blood surged in his leg and ordered him to bow down and be her servant – which would never happen.

“Are you alright?” she asked, gently. “Your child… she…” She knelt in front of Midori, and no matter how much he wanted to snatch her away, he couldn’t quite bring himself to. The red-headed girl placed her hand on Midori’s forehead. “She’s burning up…”

“Princess…” The white-haired man – the one who had to be the white dragon, Hakuryuu – spoke up, a slight frown on his face. “Princess, this man… and this girl…”

“Hm? What is it, Kija?” she asked, turning her face away, and Jae-ha felt a stab of irritation as he suddenly found himself able to breathe properly again.

“Ah… they’re Ryokuryuu, Princess…”

“I see,” she said, kindly, turning her eyes back on them. The dragon blood would do anything to please those eyes, but Jae-ha…

He forced himself to his feet, Midori in his hands, and his eyes were hard.

“Please,” he begged, swallowing his not-inconsiderable pride. “Please,” where he wouldn’t have asked that way at any other time, of any other person, ‘please’ where he had told himself once upon a time that he would do nothing short of put Hiryuu in his place, “do whatever you want with me, but I swear, if you place one hand on her…!”

The girl simply looked at him with impossible purple eyes.

“I won’t make you do anything,” she said, standing up to her full height. “I am but a traveler, who has come seeking the power of Kouka’s four dragons. I want to ask you to lend me your aid. I’m not anything special. No one at all. Will you give me your power?”

He watched her. It took all of his strength to get the word out.

“No,” he said. Then, bolstered by that answer, he continued, “No. I value my freedom over anything else. I made a promise once that even if Hiryuu appeared in front of me, I would kick him away. I won’t be chained by anything – especially not a dragon’s blood.”

“Princess…!” protested Hakuryuu, but she shook her head.

“No,” she said, “I won’t force him. We’ll search for Ouryuu instead. It’s Ryokuryuu’s choice… but, first, is there anything we can do for the girl?” she asked, and that kingly – queenly? – demeanour seemed to disappear as soon as it showed, replaced with the kinder, gentler person he’d seen before she’d learned who he was. “She just collapsed… it happened to Kija, too, when he first met me.” Hakuryuu blushed. “Is she goingt o be alright?”

“She’ll be fine,” Jae-ha protested. “Please leave.”  
  
Then he turned and took back to the sky, leaving behind him a wave of startled gasps.

\-----

Of course, nothing ever goes quite so perfectly. The dark-haired man he’d been looking to recruit turned out to be with the dragons. Princess Yona faced the Captain’s test and wowed him. Midori woke and became enamored of Seiryuu’s pet squirrel. They worked together to find a plan to catch Don Kum-ji, and Princess Yona killed him.

Yona, Yona, Yona, Yona. He cursed the name that was on his mind until Gigan sent him and Midori after them with a few stern-kind words and an expectant look. She told them both to come back, but the pull on his leg was at once both stronger and weaker in a way he couldn’t really explain, and it made his stomach knot. All he could promise was that she’d see Midori again.

\-----

“Hey, Kija?”

Jae-ha, returning from scouting the trail ahead, paused in the limbs of an overhead tree as he heard Midori ask the question. The Hakuryuu, long since accustomed to the young dragon-girl’s questions, turned to her expectantly.

“…why was papa so afraid of Lady Yona?” was the question she finally asked, and Jae-ha felt his heart leap into his throat like it was imitating his legs. The Seiryuu – Shin-ah – paused and turned towards her as well, and Yona and the spear-wielding Hak and the young medic Yoon also all seemed to turn towards Kija, waiting for a reply.  “She’s nice, and the rest of you are, too, even if you’re worse about letting me fight than Papa is!”

Kija chuckled, but frowned, searching for an answer.

“You know the legend of the four dragons, right?” he asked. He apparently didn’t trust Jae-ha to tell her, which Jae-ha didn’t blame him for in the slightest. At the young girl’s nod (and eye-roll), he continued. “Jae-ha… well, he likes being free. The ability to go wherever he wants, to do whatever he wants, he valued that over everything else. He said so himself.”

“Okay,” she said. “But Lady Yona doesn’t take that away from him. At least not any more than Captain Gigan did!”

“Right,” Kija said. “But I think your papa was afraid that she would. Since the Princess is Hiryuu, who we have to follow because of our blood, right?”

“Right,” she said. “It’s why I feel nice when Lady Yona looks at me or compliments me.”

“Mmhmm,” Kija said. “The princess is a very special person to all of us dragons, and we have to protect her. She’s just a human, after all. Jae-ha was afraid she'd use her power over us to make hiim do things he wouldn't want to, that he'd lose his freedom.”

“But, she protects us too, right?” asked Midori, and Jae-ha’s eyes widened a little in surprise. “It’s all the little things. When you pass out because you’ve done too much ‘cause you’re weak,” and he saw Kija’s eyebrow twitch, “or when Shin-ah gets upset because Papa’s trying to get his mask, she’s always there for both of you. And she combs my hair and helps me practice and listens to Papa play music… she’s always there for us. For papa just as much as anyone. Lady Yona would never make him do anything he didn't want to. I don’t know why he was so scared, but then… I guess that makes sense. Papa’s always hated chains more than anything else in the world.” She closed her eyes and smiled. “I hope that someday he stops being so scared of Lady Yona. We’re the four dragons, and King Hiryuu loves us just as much as we love him. When Ouryuu joins us, then… won’t we be like a family? Just like Captain Gigan and her crew…”

She opened her eyes and smiled brightly at Kija. “Hey, we are like a crew! And Lady Yona’s our captain. Maybe if we explain that to Papa, he’ll like her better. I… I miss the way Papa was, when it was just us and the crew. We’d fly high, and fight, and be pirates. But… he’s starting to open up to Lady Yona, isn’t he? And we’ll be a family that can’t ever be torn apart. When Don Kum-ji was killed, there wasn’t a crew anymore. But even when we get Kouka back for Lady Yona, there’ll still be four dragons.” She paused, then grinned. “Only there’ll be five, because of me! Nobody can take that away.”

Midori. He had to take a moment to compose himself as her words shot straight to the heart of him. She was wrong, of course – the pulsing bond that tied him to her, even as he fervently wished, like he had when he was just a kid, that he could hate her because it would be so much easier, saw to that – but… in the most important ways, she was right, too.

 _What did I ever do to deserve this?_ , he thought, and for once it wasn’t a bemused or sarcastic bemoaning of his fate, but a sincere plea to the gods. He _didn’t_ deserve her, or any of them. And yet.

He hopped down from the tree. The others came to greet him. Yona, somehow sensing that he needed comfort, or support, was there with her kind eyes.

_Family._

_What a concept._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure how satisfied I am with this fic. The vignette format was all I could really focus on and I'd never have finished a multi-chapter fic, but there are so many moments that I wish I could've added, included, or expanded on. This was supposed to be about Jae-ha's feelings about having a successor and dealing with being a dad, but it turned into something else entirely. Also, the ending is kind of tacked-on because I had no clue where I was going with it.
> 
> Also, no, Jae-ha is not creative with his naming >.>


End file.
